Submitted by Anil Kumar T V, BNI Bangalore – BNI Champions
I am Anil Kumar T V, a founding member of the world’s first ever centennial chapter with over 100 members in Bangalore, India – BNI Champions. I am the president of the chapter, and also Senior Launch Director Consultant.
I also belong to the Arya Vysya community. Members in this community have been known as trading leaders in South India for centuries, with some of South India’s most prominent businessmen among the group. We have 23 million members worldwide.
Members of Arya Vysya are rich in culture, adopt high values, live up to ethics, and have the best economical and financial practices. Charity is in our nature and business is in our blood.
Then, what is missing in the community?
Our areas of improvement are professional approach, technology adoption, and positive attitude. Some of us from the group were thinking about how to bring about these changes in the community and form a group with very high standards, and we discussed various options. That is when we thought of BNI.
BNI sets higher standards, and with the Givers Gain philosophy all BNI members are pre-disposed to do good for others. So we thought, why not have only BNI members in this group?
We created a small WhatsApp group of Arya Vysya members. The purpose of the group is to have get-togethers, movie socials, and develop personal relationships. We wanted only the Arya Vysyas in the group who belong to BNI, as there was great synergy and bonding amongst us. As the word of the group spread, to everyone’s surprise within two weeks there were about 174 Arya Vysya BNI members in Bangalore alone, and few from Mysore city, too, who had joined the group. This is 10% of BNI Bangalore’s members. We arranged the first ever social on June 19, 2016, and named this informal group Arya Vysya Business Tycoons. More than 100 members registered and made the event a fabulous experience.
The purpose of the group is to bring the Arya Vysya professional business community together for family bonding, business growth, and a better life by helping each other.
Some of the activities proposed for the group are:
- Sharing and spreading information about the community festivals;
- Helping in matrimonial alliances;
- Family socials at regular intervals for more family bonding;
- Creating job opportunities;
- Providing start-up support;
- Mentoring the budding entrepreneurs;
- Providing training programs to improve skill sets;
- Helping each other to generate more business;
- Joint ventures and business partnerships.
The Referrals in BNI started to increase as we followed the following protocol:
- Always pass the referrals to the members of the BNI chapter where you belong to.
- If there is no member in the chapter who can fulfil a specific need, share the information on the WhatsApp group so that someone in the group can do the job or a group member can recommend a member from their BNI chapter.
- If no member in BNI chapters can fulfil the need, encourage relevant Arya Vysya community businessmen to join BNI chapters.
Already a lot of community members who are not BNI members are asking about BNI, and two of them have joined BNI chapters after hearing about how Arya Vysya community members believe BNI is the way to do business. A lot of business started happening in the group, which is helping the members and BNI, which otherwise would have gone to outside the community or BNI.
As business is in the blood of Arya Vysya members and there are so many of us, BNI could get a lot of new members as word spreads about this success story.
It is always an amazing journey when we walk together with like minds.
If business is an ocean, and the Arya Vysya community is a ship, then BNI is the lighthouse.
